tely that a rumour
arose that he was dead. Sir John had married Donne's old friend, Mrs
Magdalen Herbert, for whom Donne wrote two of the most ingenious of his
lyrics, "The Primrose" and "The Autumnal." The popularity of Donne as a
preacher rose to its zenith when he returned to his pulpit, and it
continued there until his death. Walton, who seems to have known him
first in 1624, now became an intimate and adoring friend. In 1630
Donne's health, always feeble, broke down completely, so that, although
in August of that year he was to have been made a bishop, the entire
breakdown of his health made it worse than useless to promote him. The
greater part of that winter he spent at Abury Hatch, in Epping Forest,
with his widowed daughter, Constance Alleyn, and was too ill to preach
before the king at Christmas. It is believed that his disease was a
malarial form of recurrent quinsy acting upon an extremely neurotic
system. He came back to London, and was able to preach at Whitehall on
the 12th of February 1631. This, his latest sermon, was published, soon
after his demise, as _Death's Duel_. He now stood for his statue to the
sculptor, Nicholas Stone, standing before a fire in his study at the
Deanery, with his winding-sheet wrapped and tied round him, his eyes
shut, and his feet resting on a funeral urn. This lugubrious work of art
was set up in white marble after his death in St Paul's cathedral, where
it may still be seen. Donne died on the 31st of March 1631, after he had
lain "fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change." His aged
mother, who had lived in the Deanery, survived him, dying in 1632.

Donne's poems were first collected in 1633, and afterwards in 1635,
1639, 1649, 1650, 1654 and 1669. Of his prose works, the _Juvenilia_
appeared in 1633; the _LXXX Sermons_ in 1640; _Biathanatos_ in 1644;
_Fifty Sermons_ in 1649; _Essays in Divinity_, 1651; his _Letters to
Several Persons of Honour_, 1651; _Paradoxes, Problems and Essays_,
1652; and _Six and Twenty Sermons_, 1661. Izaak Walton's _Life of
Donne_, an admirably written but not entirely correct biography,
preceded the _Sermons_ of 1640. The principal editor of his posthumous
writings was his son, John Donne the younger (1604-1662), a man of
eccentric and scandalous character, but of considerable talent.

The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly
wide and deep, although almost wholly malign. His originality and the
fervour of his